This is not an optimized post. This is a post that recognizes the mistake that I–and many other SEO’s (Search Engine Optimizers)–have made.

You see, many SEO’s–including me–try to fulfill a demand that isn’t there. We either try to get people to search for us when there’s already WAY too much competition OR we try to get people to search for us… when nobody’s searching for that keyword!

But what’s even worse, though, is the mistake behind that mistake (i.e. the “meta-mistake”). We ask ourselves “How do I get traffic to my website?” instead of asking ourselves “What does Google need fulfilled?”

The reason this mistake is so deadly to our traffic and our sales is because Google will EASILY let us go to the top. It’ll easily let us go to the top by giving us massive value in the form of (qualified) traffic. But Google typically only gives us value in proportion to the value that we give Google.

And it’s so easy to get all that traffic, all those people, to our site… We just need to give Google what it wants–which is what people are actually searching for. And we can find what people are actually searching for IF we ask ourselves, “What does Google need fulfilled?”

If we get out of ourselves and out of our comfort zone, Google can become the greatest business partner anyone has ever had.

Note: I am not an attorney, and you should not consider this legal advice. This is Self Defense 101 for interacting with the music industry.

It pains me as a musician to suggest the ways on how you can purchase high quality music, buy beats online, for a low price. Yet, it’s obvious that you want to get the highest profit with your work for the least amount of buck. Also, $500,000 (i.e. for an ad campaign) seems a little pricey when you simply want to introduce the music into the beginning of your work or set it as the background of your music.

So, something you might want to know when you buy beats online is that you can get some really high quality beats for cheap–if only because the musician simply doesn’t know what he’s doing in the music publishing realm.

Buy Beats Online: Introduction

So, we’re going to discuss two main things when you buy beats online: 1) What you actually purchase and 2) Where you can purchase these high-quality beats. These are the two fundamentals toward getting the beats that you want. I’m going to cover #1 for now and link you to number two in an upcoming post.

I’m not saying that other publishers and writers don’t know what they’re talking about (they do), it’s just that most of what I’ve seen takes the music publishers into account, but it doesn’t take you into account.

Music publishers pushing for higher rates on their end doesn’t exactly take you into account, does it?

Buy Beats Online: What Are You REALLY Purchasing?

You MUST know what the hell you’re buying. That is, you want to know what you’re buying if you want to avoid the chance of a huge lawsuit should your creative work go big. You need to know what rights you have with the music you purchase, even though it can get a little technical.

You might buy a license for:

Personal Use License- (i.e. iTunes) In this license, you cannot redistribute this for a public performance or sale of any kind (Note: Mechanical License for Alterations)

A Mechanical License – In this license, you can alter the beats the person has made while keeping the initial integrity of the song)

A work-for-hire license – In this license, You pay a flat fee and the song is (usually) completely yours

A step deal – This, like the inadvertently created deal above, dictates that you pay the musician in amounts that elevate according to certain milestones you reach… let’s say that you purchase the beats to the song and you pay a certain royalty… then your music or your film his the box office for billions of dollars and rapes the world record a new one… according to the deal, you’ll need to pay something like “$10K bonus for every million made.”

NOTE!

Ensure that I, the music publisher, haven’t registered the songs I created via work-for-hire to ASCAP. This is because an ASCAP registered song doesn’t honor a work-for-hire agreement. And if you think you’ll commercialize an ASCAP-registered song without paying fees, you’ve got a surprise coming for you, per ASCAP’s site.

Also, according the music industry expert Randall Wixen in his book The Plain and SImple Guide to Music Publishing he notes frequently the power of performing rights organizations frequently.

By the way, as a music publisher, that would be cool if I could step up my income up based on your success.

For example, let’s say you make Avatar and “gross” $1,000,000,000 in revenue.

$1,000,000,000 => $1000 Million => 1000 x $10,000 = $10,000,000 you pay to me because of how awesomely successful you are.

Even though $10,000,000 is 1% of your revenue (note the chart below) and $10,000,000 has two fewer zeroes than the overall revenue from Avatar it’s still a huge chunk of money.

Sure, it seems fair that my awesome music helped make your movie what it is. But let’s face it. $10,000,000’s a rather big sum of money that you pay to me, right?

Well, even though I deserve the money or I feel that I deserve it (you know, because I created that kick-ass music/set of beats that helped you make your blockbuster hit)—even though I feel I deserve the money–you’ll get a much better deal by using a work-for-hire agreement with me.

And as we said before, the work-for-hire agreement means that you get to keep full rights to the music (usually), no questions asked.

You’d also make sure that the music you retrieve from me is NOT ASCAP registered–otherwise ASCAP will come aknocking for the royalties for:

Movie theater presentations (or a percentage of the revenue) and

the DVD sales royalties.

NOTE!

Just because you’ve drafted the work-for-hire agreement doesn’t mean that you can’t put royalty agreements or pay me, the musician, when your move turns into the blockbuster.

Buy Beats Online: License Recap

So, to recap, to save money, make sure that

Whatever work you want from me is NOT ASCAP-registered

Draft a work-for-hire agreement where you gain 100% ownership of my work (or some variation that allows me some ownership… which’d be more fair)

Buy Beats Online: Conclusion

What could it cost you not to learn the material above and make sure you know what you purchase? If you said, “It’d cost me big time,” I’d agree with you very much.

Look forward to seeing your awesome music with my work on the big screen. Just consider sending a royalty… even if the government doesn’t ask you to! It’s the music writers that give depth and vision to your work.

Did you know that you can literally kill yourself by the way you talk?

Consider this quote from

“… an instrument that we possess at birth, and with which we play unconsciously all our life, as a baby plays with its rattle. It is however a dangerous instrument; it can wound or even kill you if you handle it imprudently and unconsciously. It can on the contrary save your life when you know how to employ it consciously” (11, Émile Coué in Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion)

In my research and in my experience, this term affects the following areas of your life:

Whether you believe in God/Allah, Satan (note: Gnosticism), or nothing

How you see your world

How you see yourself and project yourself into the world

How you believe about the world

What/How you value certain things/emotions within the world

What/How you understand

What/How you act and learn a skill

What/How you use a given a technique in an area

What situations you put yourself into and how you put yourself into these situations

I encountered this awesome article on songwriting. Probably could’ve gone well with the earlier post on making instrumentals.

Here’s the part I liked:

“A song usually has three short melodies, two of which are repeated several times…

Chorus: The chorus is a lyrics-music combination that is repeated with little or no change throughout the song…

Verse: The verse has the second melody of the song… The verse’s lyrics are actually what usually change; as the verses usually give details about the song’s topic…

Bridge: The third melody and the one that -in most song structures- appears only once. It is better if the listener gets a small surprise in the bridge… The bridge’s lyrics they usually represent a conclusion or a flash back to the whole song, this adds to the surprise. Sometimes, -especially in Rock- the bridge is just an instrumental solo with no lyrics.”

This actually became incredibly useful for me. Along with his notes on “agreed-on song structures,” I’ve started compiling my song ideas into this structure. And, for me, my music is like a liquid… I need to pour it into a container for others to drink.

Here is an interesting quote. Again, I’m no expert in industrial music publishing; however, I find this quote incredibly inspiring.

“In this day [music publishing], and a particularly [industrial music publishing], in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern [musicians] have written and played on these subjects… My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my [studio]” (adapted from Shelley’s Frankenstein).

This quote has driven me to a level of inspiration so high in whatever I pursue. Whether I develop my skills in music or business (music business?), I look back at that quote often and feel even more driven to get the latest details and wisdom from the experts.

Perhaps it can help you, too. I wonder how much we can improve ourselves by looking a little bit more, by bringing just a little bit more quality information into our lives that we actually use.

Perhaps it would help us quite a bit to have the experts point us in the right direction–if only just a little bit more.

This post may blow your mind. If you interact with negative people–even by accident–on a regular basis, then this might be useful to you. I’m no expert in music publishing yet, but I am aware that certain things can prevent you from publishing a big hit.

In Lord of the Flies, William Golding writes about a group of kids who crash landed on a deserted island. In this setting, he shows us how kids–and therefore people–interact with others on a deep, reptile level.

I like the quote that follows because it shows us something about ourselves that we can really learn from. Something that, once we learn to see this in life, we can work around it a little bit more.

In this section, Roger sees Henry playing in the sand. Standing behind a palm tree, some nuts hang above him, shake, then fall around him. This gives him an idea.

“Roger stopped, picked up a stone, aimed, and threw it at Henry–threw it to miss… Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policeman and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that new nothing of him and was in ruins.”

This little piece shows us two things at once:

It shows us how civilization has beaten down our dark side

It shows us how civilization has beaten out what we want in life

Naturally, the first helps us out. It stops someone else from beating us senseless to see if we have any money on us (most of the time). It stops some really dark stuff from happening.

But what about the second one? I’d like to think that the people around us have very specific ideas of what they want us to be.

Our parents want us to grow up and get a good job.

Our friends want to feel special, so if you do something new, they’ll call everything we want to do “Stupid,” “Retarded,” or they’ll say, “Oh, that’ll never work.”

Our boss, should we choose a job, wants us to shut up and do it the way it’s always been done; he doesn’t want us to rock the boat

If you’ve read Lord of the Flies, then you’ll know that Roger does become evil and knocks this fat kid, Piggy off a cliff. We probably don’t want to do that, but you’ll probably want to do something like publish a great song that gets you $50,000 in revenue each year.

So how do we avoid civilization’s conditioning? How do we start throwing rocks that actually hit the target–in the good sense?

There’s a couple ways that seem to work for me at the moment–I haven’t achieve success yet, but the following list can help you. It might seem like a stretch, but if we want to get past civilization telling us we’re wrong for going after something we want, then you might want to try this:

In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he says to hold an imaginary counsel with those you admire; this will put the qualities you want from them into your own self

In Napoleon Hill’s Master-Key to Riches, he suggests holding a counsel with the “Eight Princes” (similar to the one above… but helps you make your emotions better, more empowering)

We can constantly read what will make us stronger

We can believe something like, “Whenever [Person X] interacts with me, it means that she hates me or feels indifferent to me; anytime she’s quiet or stays away, it means she loves me.”

I’ve made this a study of mind, but if try out the above four things, you’ll notice a big difference in how you see the world.

(Tid Bit: I definitely want speak on this topic at some point in the future. How about I present this topic for my birthday on November 11th, 2012?)

If you’re having trouble sticking to commitments or playing long and complicated pieces, consider this (NOTE: You’ll want to actually follow along for this post)

This tool has changed my life more than anything else.

(Also! You may find it interesting to note that this represents the biggest cause of divorce in the United States — Statistics will tell you “Money fights,” but it’s the principle BEHIND the money fights that causes the problem!)

Enter Wyatt Woodsmall

In-Time People:

In-Time People perceive their timeline from side-to-side. Where the past stretches from your left to your future to your right (or vice versa if you’re left-handed).

Are Often Late for Commitments

Don’t See The “Bigger Picture”

Can’t Get Themselves Organized

Hate Schedules/Planning

“In The Moment”

Sleep More Easily

Cons: The people are more likely to take drugs, for example, because they don’t see the long-term consequences.. they don’t see how it’ll affect them in the future.

Pros: However, the positive of these people is that they can really enjoy life, enjoy the moment.

Through-Time People:

Through-Time People visualize their timeline from back-to-front and can therefore “see their future.” Because through-time people can see ahead in their timeline at most times, they naturally think about the consequences of their actions.

Arrive On-Time Or, Usually, Early

Always Think a Dozen Steps Ahead

Usually Consider the Consequence

Sometimes Have Trouble Sleeping

Cons: These people can have trouble living in the moment… Have a “Through-Time Mindset” tends to ruin the luxury of a “care-free vacation.”

Pros: These people run our society. You can rest assured that Presidents and founders of Fortune 500 companies are “Through-Time” People

You-Time People

Now, here’s what you can do. Take your timeline and ROTATE it 90%.

If your timeline goes from side-to-side, you can rotate it so that your past is behind you and your future is in front (typically avoid placing your past in front of you).

If your timeline goes from back-to-front, then you can rotate it from side-to-side (typically, if you’re right-handed, so that past is to your left and your future is to your right.

Now that you’re aware of how your mind perceives time–and how our perception of time affects our life, you now have the option of making yourself more structured and organized, or alternatively you have the option of making yourself more spontaneous and in the moment.”

—

If you’ll just play with this at varying times in your life, you’ll notice some profound differences in everything you do: From music playing, to signing your music contract, to interacting with your musician friends.

I tend to favor Through-Time, by the way, because when you hold yourself in a “Through-Time” manner:

You’ll be more likely to play in harmony with the rest of your band members

You’ll “see/hear/feel” the notes well-before they come to you

If you have something memorized really well, you’ll think about the outcomes you want for your performances

You’re more likely to see the consequences of any deal you sign

You’re more likely to direct your practice to making ACTUAL differences in your playing ability, in other words: